Contemporary Philosophical Engagement

Third and last, as we saw in his comments on what he calls modern “historicist” philosophies, Eliade does not regard himself as a detached scholar, solely interested in the obscure customs of people from distant ages. Though his professional life is taken up with scholarship, ancient texts, and archaic ideas, he sees himself as very much a man engaged with the ideas and

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culture of his own time, a theorist who draws from his knowledge of the past to address important philosophical issues that confront society in the present. He is quite frank, for example, in arguing that scholars and intellectuals of the modern era have greatly underestimated the psychological merits of archaic thinking, which has sustained human endeavors for so much of the history of civilization. While, again, some greatly admire this “philosophical” side of Eliade, there are others who say it damages any claim he may have to scientific objectivity. There is undoubtedly more to be said on this matter, but as it stands, it has already taken us into the final task of this chapter, which is to turn from Eliade’s theory itself to the main complaints of his critics.

Eliade’s theory of religion is greatly admired in some quarters and strongly contested in others. This is hardly surprising, given the bold stance he takes against reductionist approaches and the broad scope of his interests. As should be apparent from the discussion we have just concluded, Eliade is not afraid to tackle large questions and take sides on controversial matters of current interest, though both of those policies have a way of placing other scholars in a very skeptical mood right from the start. Among the charges of Eliade’s detractors, it is helpful to make a distinction between minor complaints and those that are more serious. Certain misgivings expressed about his work seem quite marginal or even mistaken. It has been said by some, for example, that evidence from Chinese religions and from Islam is missing from Eliade’s writings, even though he claims to be a “global” comparativist. Others claim that examples which might discredit his claims can never be found in his books; that he does not carefully evaluate the texts and scholars he relies on; and that he applies our modern concepts to ancient peoples.³¹ Still others have claimed that his views are a throwback to Victorian social evolutionism and that his methods are largely intuitive and speculative rather than scientific.³² In fairness, we should first note that some of these criticisms could be made of almost any theory as broad as Eliade’s, while others could, in part, be answered or even corrected. Failing to speak at length about Islamic or Chinese religions, for example, would not be a serious oversight unless significant evidence from these traditions could be found to contradict the general conclusions Eliade draws from his other evidence in some significant respect. After all, no one who seeks to make general observations can possibly know all of the available evidence. Again, it does not seem accurate to say Eliade is some sort of oldschool social evolutionist. He recognizes the fact of change in history, but for him change is by no means to be equated with irreversible evolutionary progress.

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These points aside, questions about Eliade’s approach still can be raised on several other, more important matters. Specifically, reservations have been raised about the issues of theology, history, and conceptual precision, or clarity.

A number of observers have claimed that the key problem with Eliade is a religious one. Hidden within his theory, they say, are certain prior assumptions, both religious and philosophical, that undermine its objectivity; therefore it cannot be scientific. In recent years, several outspoken critics have claimed that Eliade is really a Christian theologian—or even missionary—in disguise. He believes in God and presents all religions in a favorable light, so that he can then show Christianity to be the true and best form among them.³³ As one might guess, this charge is a source of considerable controversy, which Eliade’s own statements unfortunately do not help to clarify. Though he published both a journal and an autobiography and discussed his career in a wide-ranging published interview, he has always remained evasive about his personal religious convictions. Another issue is that even if he were to admit to a Christian motive behind his work, we could not discredit his arguments and analyses for that reason alone, any more than, earlier on, we could dismiss the theories of Marx and Freud merely because these were inspired by decidedly antireligious motives. The question that must be asked is whether such prior beliefs, on either side of the issue, actually enter the theory in such a way as to make it invalid for anyone who does not accept them. Once we put the matter this way, perhaps the best that can be said is this: Although it may be true that Eliade allows his own religious sympathies to influence his science, none of his critics has so far proved that point to general satisfaction. Interestingly, one of the most objective and careful observers to write on this issue argues that Eliade’s theory does in part depend upon what he calls a “normative” religious point of view, but this stance is closer to that of antihistorical Eastern religions like Hinduism than it is to Christianity.³⁴ Others argue that Eliade’s personal creed is in fact the cosmic religion of the archaic peoples he so much appreciates, and that because of this he fails to do justice to the nonarchaic, historical perspective of Judaism and Christianity as well as to the nonreligious modern perspective when he raises doubts about their value.

Another set of critics claims that troubles lie in the path not of theology but of history. As we noted above, Eliade feels he has succeeded in making the

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study of religion both a phenomenological and historical enterprise. He claims not only to explain the timeless symbolic forms of religion but also to show how they change with each new historical situation. His historical critics, however, are not so sure. They point out, often quite persuasively, that in reality only the timeless forms seem to count for Eliade; their special historical contexts, each with its small but significant variations of, say, the great tree, the moon cycle, or the eternal return, seem to count very little in his interpretations. In framing his generalizations, Eliade draws examples from very distant places in space and time; he lifts them out of their setting, finds surface similarities, and on that basis concludes that they form a significant pattern. Regardless of whether he turns to Vedic India several thousand years ago, to European peasants of the Middle Ages, or to primitive people living today, he finds in all religions the same basic categories of thought. Everywhere, it seems, he is able to find the same types of symbol and the same forms of myth, all expressing the same core of ideas: the reality of the sacred, a reliance on its archetypes, the escape from history, and the symbolism of return. The conclusion easily drawn from this argument is that Eliade’s entire program is subject to just the sort of criticism first leveled at Frazer more than half a century earlier. It may well be that some method of this kind must be followed by anyone who attempts a truly universal theory of religion, but that does not necessarily mean Eliade’s is sound. As was the case with Frazer, each time a careful anthropologist or historian who has closely studied a certain society shows that one of its symbols or myths cannot be fitted into Eliade’s grand patterns, another crack appears in the theory’s foundation. One or a few may not weaken the structure, but the effect of such cumulative weakening is likely to be serious.

Alongside both these problems, there is finally the matter of certain key concepts that seem, if not confused, at least somewhat imprecise and unfocused. It is troubling that at just those moments when we want him to be very clear, Eliade’s discussions can turn out to be rather disappointingly vague and elusive. Instead of sharp, clear lines, we tend to find a mist. On the question of symbolism, to give just one example, anthropologist Edmund Leach has pointed to a significant confusion. Eliade tells us that myths often present the division between the sacred and the profane and then introduce a third thing that connects them: a boat, a bridge or ladder, a pole, or “great tree.” What is important, Eliade explains, is not the content of the symbols but their structure, the linkage they make between the sacred and profane. Whether the connecting object is a boat rather than a bridge does not really matter, since the

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important thing is the form, or framework, of the symbols—the relationships between them—rather than the actual content of the symbols themselves. At the same time, we are in other places told with equal emphasis that certain connecting symbols—like the great tree as axis mundi—must be considered superior to others. But surely that can be true only if the content of the symbol does, in fact, matter after all. So we have a confusion. Could it be, Leach asks, that Eliade has from the start decided—perhaps for his own religious reasons—that certain symbols which he personally prefers must come out of the analysis as better than others? Could it be that content is more important than formal relationships after all? Whether or not Leach is correct, the matter of symbols and their precise significance is too important in Eliade’s theory to be left in this kind of uncertainty.

Despite these problems, Eliade certainly deserves admiration for being one of the few thinkers of his age to assert boldly the independence of religious behavior over against the various forms of functionalist reductionism. He can also be commended for at least attempting an approach that draws its data from almost every world religion and tries to account for all the evidence within the framework of a single comprehensive system. Whether he has succeeded, or ever could succeed, with such an ambitious program is of course another matter. Interestingly, among those who think not, it is sometimes suggested that a more promising approach would be simply to abandon Eliade’s hopes of a “global” theory and refocus the aims of inquiry altogether. They claim that just as much can be learned not by looking for general patterns but by doing the very opposite: by centering upon the religion of a single place or people and exploring it in painstaking depth and detail. As we shall see next,

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that is the approach made famous by the renowned English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

1. Mircea Eliade, Journal III: 1970–1978, tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 179.

2. Autobiography: Volume 1, 1907–1937, Journey East, Journey West, tr. Mac Linscott Ricketts (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 94. In addition to Eliade’s own autobiography and journals, accounts of his life include Ioan Culianu, Mircea Eliade (Assisi, Italy: Cittadella Editrice, 1977) and Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1987), pp. 70–128. The most extensive account of Eliade’s early years is Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907– 1945, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

3. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Roquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 6–8.

4. Eliade, Ordeal, pp. 54–56.

5. Eliade, Ordeal, pp. 162–63.

6. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Meridian Books [1949] 1963), p. xiii.

7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World [1956 French], 1957), pp. 12–13.

8. Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, Volume II: 1937–1960: Exile’s Odyssey, tr. Mac Linscott Rickets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 188–89.

9. Genesis 28:17.

10. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, pp. 55–56.

11. Eliade, Patterns, p. 91.

12. Mircea Eliade, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 103.

13. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 98–99.

14. Eliade, Patterns, p. 124.

15. Eliade, Patterns, p. 183.

16. Eliade, Patterns, p. 170.

17. Eliade, Patterns, p. 158.

18. Eliade, Patterns, p. 158.

19. Eliade, Patterns, p. 216.

20. Eliade, Patterns, p. 265.

21. Eliade, Patterns, p. 315.

22. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 314–15.

23. Eliade, Patterns, p. 322.

24. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 92.

25. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper Torchbooks [1949], 1959), p. 52.

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26. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 35.

28. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 104.

29. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 111.

30. William A. Lessa, review of The Sacred and the Profane, in American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 1147.

31. For a full accounting of these criticisms and their merits, see John A. Saliba, “Homo Religiosus”in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978).

32. On the claim that he is an evolutionist, see Dorothy Libby, review of Rites and Symbols of Initiation, in American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 689. On the other criticisms, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 252; and Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, Religion and Culture: An Introduction to Anthropology of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 193.

33. Among the most vocal of these critics is Canadian scholar Donald Wiebe, who, in a number of articles and books, repeats the claim that Eliade’s opposition to reductionism is not a scientific principle but a religious prejudice; see, among several of his writings that make this point, Religion and Truth (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton Publishers, 1981).

34. Douglas Allen, Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics in Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenology of Religion and New Directions (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton Publishers, 1978), pp. 221–45, especially pp. 221–22.

35. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 314–15.

36. Eliade, Patterns, p. 262.

Allen, Douglas. Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics in Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenology of Religion and New Directions. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978. A substantive analysis, difficult in places, but written by a scholar with an exceedingly wide and deep knowledge of Eliade’s life and works.

Cave, David. Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A sympathetic, but not uncritical, discussion of the humanist perspective which in the author’s view guides all of Eliade’s thinking about religion.

Dudley, Guilford, III. Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977. An instructive discussion, with a critique of the assumptions and major themes in Eliade’s works.

Eliade, Mircea. Autobiography: Volume 1, 1907–1937: Journey East, Journey West. Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. Autobiography: Volume 2, 1937–1960: Exile’s Odyssey. Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. In these volumes Eliade himself provides a narrative of his life and thought up through his first years at the University of Chicago.

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Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper Torchbooks [1949 French], 1959.

Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries. Translated by Philip Mairet. New York: Harper Colophon Books [1957 French], 1975.

Eliade, Mircea. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Roquet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. A revealing interview in which Eliade discusses his own understanding of his life and his work.

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Meridian Books [1949 French], 1963.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957.

Leach, Edmund. “Sermons by a Man on a Ladder.” The New York Review of Books, October 20, 1966. A sharply critical review of Eliade’s works from the perspective of professional anthropology.

Olson, Carl. The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade: A Search for the Centre. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. A good recent introduction to the major themes in Eliade’s work.

Rennie, Bryan. Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. A close analysis of key themes, ideas, and arguments in Eliade’s work that blends pointed criticism with insightful appreciation.

Ricketts, Mac Linscott. Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907–1945. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. The most extensive account of Eliade’s earlier years in Romania, Italy, India and other places.

Saliba, John A. “Homo Religiosus”in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. A modern anthropological assessment that mixes appreciation and criticism.

Strenski, Ivan. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987, pp. 70–128. Contains a perceptive and provocative exploration of Eliade’s ties to Romanian culture and its nationalist movement between the wars.

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7
Society’s “Construct
of the Heart”:
E. E. Evans-Pritchard

If he could alter the categories of his own generation’s universe so that

Mary Douglas, Edward Evans-Pritchard¹

E. E. Evans-Pritchard is one of the great figures in modern anthropology, a field he claimed as his profession for a period of nearly fifty years, from the 1920s to his death in 1973. Were he to have seen his name alongside the others in this book, this modest Englishman undoubtedly would have expressed some surprise, insisting that if theories of religion are the subject, he had proposed no such thing. Certain observers, in fact, might even prefer to describe him as an “antitheorist” of religion, for in one of his most widely noticed books, Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), he takes it as his mission to dismantle the ambitious schemes of explanation put forward by the pioneering figures in anthropology and the study of religion, including several of the theorists already discussed in these pages. It may be recalled that on occasion in earlier chapters we noted some of his perceptive criticisms of their views. EvansPritchard’s role in the enterprise of explaining religion, however, has been much larger than that of a critic whose main interest is to find the faults in the work of others. His considerable reputation rests on the very impressive work he was able to do “in the field”—as anthropologists prefer to say—preparing studies he carried out as a trained, professional observer of actual tribal peoples.

Of the theorists we have so far met in this book, almost all have readily offered an opinion on the nature of primitive, or tribal, religion, yet only one —Eliade in India—records even so much as a passing contact with people living in circumstances remotely similar to a real primitive society. This is

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emphatically not the case with Evans-Pritchard, who did far more than just meet or speak with a few “native” peoples. He is a theorist of religion who actually entered two primitive societies, learned their languages, lived for a time by their customs, and carefully studied them in action. The significance of his work can therefore hardly be overestimated. His approach differs from that of earlier “armchair” theorists just as experimental science does from speculation. Further, while he was critical of most theories he had encountered, Evans-Pritchard was by no means opposed to them in principle. He felt that among anthropologists, in fact, not enough effort had been put into this enterprise, and he saw his own work among tribal peoples of Africa as, if not a way of framing a full theory of his own, at least a necessary step in the right direction.

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born in 1902, the second son of a Church of England clergyman, Rev. John Evans-Pritchard, and his wife Dorothea.² The parish his father served was at Crowborough, Sussex, in the southeast of England. He took his secondary education at Winchester College, one of England’s elite public schools, and then entered Exeter College, Oxford University, where he studied for four years and graduated with an M.A. in modern history. By then his interests had already begun to turn in the direction of anthropology, so in 1923 he began graduate study at the London School of Economics. As we noted earlier, the study of anthropology in England had evolved from the older armchair-and-library sort of research practiced by Müller, Tylor, and Frazer into a discipline that required at least one apprenticeship of study devoted to a society very different—meaning “primitive” usually—from those of modern Europe and America. This was precisely the kind of work Evans-Pritchard was determined to do. In London he was able to study with C. G. Seligman, who had been the first professional anthropologist to do fieldwork in Africa. At the same time, Bronislaw Malinowski came to London and became a second mentor to him. Malinowski, a noted figure, had spent four years studying the people of the Trobriand Islands, where he was the first anthropologist to do his research in a native language and immerse himself fully in the daily life of a primitive community. He strongly encouraged EvansPritchard to do what he had done, studying the culture of a single people in great depth; Seligman encouraged him to choose a culture in Africa.

Taking the advice of both tutors, Evans-Pritchard traveled to the Sudan region of East Africa, the area where the Nile and Congo rivers find their source. Under the joint control of Egypt and Britain at the time, this area was known

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During World War II, Evans-Pritchard served in the British army, leading a Zande (this is singular; “Azande” is the plural) band of warriors on a campaign against certain Italian army defenses in East Africa. Later, while serving at a post in Cyrenaica, Libya, he did further research that led to a study of a Muslim Sufi religious order known as the Sanusi. It was at this time, in the year 1944, that he converted to Roman Catholicism. After the war, he returned to England, where he settled first at Cambridge and then became professor of social anthropology at Oxford, taking the chair occupied by the noted advocate of functionalist theory, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, on his retirement.

At Oxford Evans-Pritchard rose to even greater prominence as perhaps the leading figure in British social anthropology. During these years he published, alongside numerous articles on anthropological subjects, the results of his work in Libya, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949); the second and third of his Nuer studies, Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951) and Nuer Religion (1956); and major books on the methods and history of the field, including Social Anthropology (1951), Essays in Social Anthropology (1962), and A History of Anthropological Thought (1981); the last of these appeared a number of years after his death. Evans-Pritchard’s worldwide renown in anthropology was almost matched by his fame in and about Oxford as one of the university’s most delightfully eccentric characters. Unassuming, shy, and often dressed in clothes that allowed him to be easily mistaken for a handyman, his close associates marveled at his acid tongue and what one described as his “awesome, Celtic prowess at drinking.”⁴ In 1970 Evans-Pritchard retired from his post, and the following year, against his wishes, he was knighted. He died two years later, in 1973.

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